 Bismillah, alhamdulillah wa salatu wa salam ala Rasulillah. So today we talk about, we've been talking about how mood is associated with your thinking and how if you change your thinking, it'll change your mood. So we've really established this connection with negative thinking leading to negative mood. And so part of that cycle is there's another link to that cycle. So negative thinking can lead to withdrawal from activities, daily activities that bring happiness or satisfaction to your life. And that can also lead to worsening in mood. So this idea that negative thinking leads to you reducing activities that bring happiness in your life. And that also adds to this worsening mood. So we've been talking about how you can break this cycle by changing your thinking. And then that ideally changes to changes in your activities or bringing those activities back in your life and then improving your mood. Does that make sense? OK, all right. So we've been talking about changing the thinking, the changing the mood. I'm sorry, changing the thinking. Today, we're going to talk about changing your activities. So one way to improve your mood is to change your thinking, to change your mood. Another way is to just add activities in your life, like activating your life to break this cycle. So when you bring more activities that bring, like, stimulate your life, then that can break that cycle of becoming more active, bringing more happiness in your life and break that downward spiral. Because when we improve our mood, then this leads to less of a need to escape bad moods. And activities can also be like a distractor and also produce an escape that competes with addictive behaviors. What do I mean by activities? So the book talks about a whole list of activities. In fact, it has a whole page where it discusses several different activities on page 162, which gives you a whole menu of activities that you can do in order to improve your mood. So what it talks about specifically, you can think about it in a couple of different dimensions. So, for example, socializing. So socializing and connecting with other people who have similar experiences and struggles and creating that connection. That's an activity that can lead to improving your mood or sort of breaking that cycle. Hobbies, somethings that things that you get lost in that allow you to escape, reduce your stress and build towards something like give you a feeling that you're going towards something and then spirituality. And we've talked about that a lot in the past just integrating a spirituality into the recovery process in order to improve your sense of peace. But then also there's so many hidden benefits to that. And then exercise. So exercise is a big one in the past. We've said we'd hold off on this conversation on exercise till a later date. So what I'd like to do is go over that. Now, it was actually something we that came up in previous chapters. But I think this is a really good place to talk about it. Exercise has such an incredible effect on mood and such an incredible effect on addictive behaviors. So let's just talk about it. Exercise creates neuro anatomical changes in the brain. So changes of the structure of your brain through a process called neurogenesis, which is the birth of new neurons. So exercise promotes changes in your brain specifically in areas that have been affected by addiction. So for example, the prefrontal cortex, the frontal part of your brain as a part that helps us control our behavior or pump the brakes on our behavior. That's a part that has been shown to have deficits with people who develop an addiction. And this is an area that exercise directly works on to specifically develop and grow neurons in these areas. So so that's from the perspective of the structure of the brain. But what's really interesting is exercise releases the same neurotransmitters that many of our addictive habits do. So drugs release these neurotransmitters because again, remember drugs don't give you these chemicals. They release your own neurotransmitters. So it's not depositing something in your bank. It's releasing the money that you have in your bank. It's similarly with pornography. Pornography is not a natural reward. It's an unnatural reward that releases neurotransmitters in your brain in a way that natural rewards would not be able to allow because this the simple nature of the time and novelty of that behavior. And so exercise releases dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine. It releases endocannabinoids. It releases endogenous opiate peptides. So it releases all of these amazing neurotransmitters in your brain. Specifically, this includes dopamine in the reward pathway. So it acts as a non drug reward that competes with drugs. There was an interesting study and looked at laboratory rats. And they found that these laboratory rats that run and are rewarded by that running if they give them a opioid blocker naloxone, if they block the opioid receptor, the rewarding effect of running is diminished. So it's almost as if it's like this natural way to get high. That's essentially what it is. It's a natural way to escape. It's a natural way to replace that addictive behavior. And it's a strong one because a lot of these other tools that we've been learning about take time to really develop, whereas exercise is available to us right now to improve our mood and to act as a disruptor of addictive behavior. Like right now, you can just get up and do 20 jumping jacks, which will raise your heart rate and release these chemicals. So so that's something to keep in mind. So you can you can use a needle to introduce a chemical that goes to your brain and release all these chemicals. You can look at something that goes directly into your brain and sets a chain reaction that releases these chemicals. You can smoke something that goes into your lungs, goes to your brain that releases in your chemicals. Also, you can just jump up and exercise. And what that does is it creates this stimulation that releases all of these same neurochemicals. And and that's important to know. And really, it's just about experiencing those effects to really buy into this, to really buy into this. So OK, so exercise releases releases all these feel good chemicals. Now, what's interesting is they study this a lot in addiction. This is something that's not commonly known in addiction. And that's part of this whole thing that we're doing here. Part of what I wanted to do with this series of talks is, you know, I'm really well familiar with the recovery landscape. Because this is what I do on a regular basis. And what I'm trying to offer is things that are not necessarily readily available or commonly heard about, simply through my conversations with people on a regular basis of, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Those things that people don't necessarily have a general access to in terms of understanding or even being able to execute these things. Those are the things that excite me to talk about and to share with people because I know just by virtue of people struggling with an addictive behavior and then looking things up online or researching things, there's there's many things that will just be commonly and readily available to them. Exercise is one of those things that's less talked about and buried in the research literature, but less so a delivery mechanism for it to treat addiction. I mean, part of that is just because you can't you can't make a dollar off of it because it's you can just do it. You can just jump up and start exercising, at least not in the same way as other things. All right, so let me get back to to the point. So addiction really helps disrupt exercise really helps disrupt addiction on many levels. So let's just look at the whole natural course of addiction. There's just part of addiction and our addictive behavior where we start engaging in it and it's not yet an addictive behavior. So all of the tools that we're talking about generally are not for people that are. Sort of like experimenting and escalating their addictive behavior. So when we talk about shame and guilt, I mean, that's an important mechanism for people that are not yet addicted to drugs and alcohol or pornography or things like that. So shame and guilt is is a good mechanism to stop somebody that's experimenting or escalating. So let's say they they do something they engage in an addictive behavior. It's against their values. Their older brother finds out about it. And now they feel really ashamed of it. That's a good thing from the perspective of it being a strong motivator for them to stop where that's different for addiction, where that just sort of for somebody that's addicted and not experimenting with somebody who who's addicted. That's going to be more of a something that locks that addiction in place because it's part of the whole syndrome of addiction. All right. So when you look at somebody that's escalating and experimenting with their addiction. Studies show that exercise disrupts the escalation of drug use and prevents addiction. So they look at twins. Because twins are genetically identical. Essentially. And they find that the less active twin in adolescence compared to the more active twin. The less active twin. Less activity predicts drug and alcohol problems in adulthood when they look at these twins. They also look at high school programs. And athletic participation in youth is associated with less drug and alcohol use problems in adulthood. So again, exercise being something that is associated with addictive behaviors. And then also once people do develop an addiction or an addictive behavior, exercise has been shown to alleviate withdrawal symptoms. So anytime somebody stops in addictive behavior, there's going to be some sort of withdrawal phenomenon. There might be physiological differences depending on the addictive behavior, but there's going to be a withdrawal phenomenon. So for example, they looked at morphine dependent rats. They got these laboratory rats addicted to morphine. And then they watched them go through withdrawal. So they looked at the withdrawal signs like diarrhea, teeth, chattering, writhing, anxiety. They looked at all these signs, which are typical of morphine withdrawal. And they found that all the signs of withdrawal were decreased in the laboratory rats that were exercising compared to the sedentary rats. So exercise helps alleviate withdrawal. Also, they did this with alcohol withdrawal, too. And they found that exercise, wheel running, protected against withdrawal and withdrawal seizures. So the point being is that when we're stopping our addictive behavior, oftentimes there's a pronounced withdrawal syndrome in the beginning, but then that can linger around subtly afterwards. And exercise can be a really important part of the process to heal and recover from that. Now, here's something that's really interesting. Outside of withdrawal symptoms, then cravings is something that we talk about, like overwhelming, intrusive thoughts to engage back in our addictive behavior. You know, like you want them to go away. You just want to focus on your homework or your work or something else. And you want them to go away, but they're intruding in your mind. You couldn't wish them away if you wanted to. When you have these cravings, exercise has been shown to be protective against cravings, reducing cravings, but then also helping to decrease cravings. So they looked at this in humans with different drugs, stimulants, cannabis, nicotine and other drugs. They looked at different types of exercise, treadmill exercises and other cardiovascular exercises. And they found that exercise reduces cravings and many different studies. One study showed that cannabis users who started to exercise reduced their use by 50 percent. And then in some studies, people aren't even seeking treatment and they start to exercise and it reduces their substance use. OK, and then finally, the last thing I'll say about exercise, because it's important to really understand the benefit of it so we can use it not only for our mental health and mood, but then also its effects on our addictive behavior. OK, so they looked at relapse now. People who stay substance free for a long period of time and they're trying to maintain those gains and not go back to the addictive behavior. And they found that it's helpful in preventing relapse, reducing relapse, curbing the risk of relapse. So let's just look at laboratory rats because they're easy to control and study. Addictive laboratory rats, the drug is they get them addicted to a drug, then they take the drug away and then they see how they behave. They see how often they seek the drug out. And then they look at that and they use that as an objective measure as to how addictive they are. If they're seeking the drug out constantly, then they look at that frequency as a measure of how preoccupied they are with their drug. So they can't get it, but they can try to get it. So they start looking at how hard do they work to try to get it? So basically the rats that could exercise had access to wheel running, sought out the drug less than rats that couldn't exercise. So in other words, these rats that stopped their addictive behavior, they didn't have access to drugs anymore. All we could look at them was how obsessed are they with their addictive behavior? How obsessed are they going back to their addictive behavior? Those that were exercising were less obsessed or preoccupied with it. And also they were less responsive to triggers. So different triggers like light flashes that were associated with the drug use that remind them of the drug use. Whereas laboratory rats that were sedentary, they were easily triggered versus laboratory rats that were running. So for example, like going to the store and being triggered by something you see or driving past like a liquor store or going past the spot or whatever it is, all of these things are visual triggers. All of these things are visual triggers that set off that obsession to use and engage in our addictive behavior. Exercise was something that decreases the response of that trigger and throws cold water over that trigger. And what was interesting is even one session of wheel running decreased drug seeking. So I wrote a chapter on exercise and addiction. It's available online. I wrote this like five or six years ago. In a textbook called Lifestyle Psychiatry. And it goes into the nuances of exercise and addiction. You can find it on Google Scholar Online if you want to learn about this a little bit more. But this is really interesting. And it's really an abridged version of the wealth of data there is out there on exercise and using this. I mean, in a lot of ways, exercise is like the metaphor of doing something about your addiction. Like just learning and just thinking about this and sort of preparing for it. That that's an important stage. But once we get to the action stage, exercise is a really great metaphor of something that's tangible that we're doing on a regular basis, whether that be three times a week or whatever. It's a tangible metric of am I doing something today for my recovery? Am I doing something today for my recovery? Similar with meetings. Like meetings are a tangible way to say am I doing something with my recovery or therapy or going to the masjid or committing to like a circle of learning so on and so forth. These are really good objective measures as opposed to staying inside of ourselves and kind of thinking, am I doing this or am I not doing this? Am I making progress as any of this working? And so that's a really great tool that I think people should be aware of in their journey to stop this. So I'm gonna go to the book now on page 154. It talks about behavioral activation and addiction and recovery. This section is behavioral activation and addiction recovery. So basically behavioral activation is this idea that it's this approach to mental health that focuses on using behaviors to activate your mood or to change your mental state. So one, like we mentioned before you can change your thinking to change your mental state and then change your behaviors. So the endpoint is behaviors and the beginning point is thinking. The other way is to start with behaviors. Changing your behaviors sort of stimulates you. So you incorporate exercise, you incorporate social activities, you incorporate hobbies as activities, you incorporate connection with family, friends and supportive people. You incorporate that and that changes your mood and your thinking. Now in reality, we do both. We acknowledge and practice. There's changing your thinking and changing your behavior. So you do them both simultaneously, you learn about them individually as a teaching tool but in reality, you just do them both simultaneously to break yourself out of it. If you can't do one tool, everybody's different. Everybody has a different background. For some people, mindfulness is such a foreign concept. They're gonna be really shut down to it and that's not uncommon. It really depends on people's backgrounds, where they're coming from. Similarly, therapy. Some people, they're just gonna be totally shut down to therapy. It's not a concept that they're gonna be as open to. Similarly, support groups, exercise, spirituality. Everybody has one of those things that is an easy yes, a low hanging fruit and they say, yeah, that makes sense to me. The idea is to take whatever you're open to and develop that strongly and then stay open to other things. And for many people, it's a trial and error process and many people, they're just a journey of like just having, being sick and tired of being sick and tired of this, it just opens them up to just try whatever. Just like, let me, I'll do whatever this time. I'm just so tired of this. So a lot of times that will open people's minds up to doing things they weren't initially willing to do. I can't tell you how many times I hear somebody who's so excited about a particular tool in recovery who in the beginning of their journey was like, no, no, you don't understand. We don't do that. That's not something that I do or it's not, that's a those people thing. It's not a me people thing. And then all of a sudden, a year later, they're like the guru at it or they're really motivated by it, which is excellent. So basically behavior activation, it has this concept and then it's a process. And this is what the book goes into. So I'll frame the book for you and then I would invite you to read it because it goes through a chapter by section by section by section, but this is, it's helpful. When I was reading it, it's helpful to have a high level view of what it is. What is this behavioral activation? So there's a concept and then there's the process. So the process consists of activity monitoring, activity scheduling. So yeah, it gets nuanced. It's not just like, here's this concept. You know, have fun with it, try to work it out. It's almost like, now let's step by step go through it to like how do we activate our behaviors and improve our moods and reduce our addictive behaviors. So the process is activity monitoring, activity scheduling, goal setting, gradual goal setting not like pie in the sky vague goals, but short-term goals that are realistic achievable, not goals that we're gonna just like set as these big things that we wish we could do, but may just break our morale when we can't do them. So realistic achievable goals that we break down into small steps that are manageable, attainable, that we almost create them in a way that we know that we're gonna be able to attain them and it's gonna build up our morale and take us to the next step. So whatever your goal is, you might even wanna reduce it by 50%, just so you are absolutely sure you can make it and lead farther down the journey. And then it talks about behavioral activation, like what are the activities that work for you? So that's where it goes into the page of, it has a whole page of just a huge list of activities. So you just wanna go through that list and figure out what activities you can do and then problem solving. So how do you overcome obstacles that get in the way of you doing these activities? So let's start with activity monitoring. So they call it activity tracking, exercise 8.1. And they say this is the first step in developing a healthy, rewarding life is to get an accurate sense of how you spend your time. So basically you just start with identifying and tracking your day. Like what do you, what does the day look like now? What does my day look like now? Just track that and say, what do I do when I wake up? What do I do in the afternoon? What do I do in the evening? On page 158, they actually have an activity tracking form. So seven to eight, what do I do? What's the activity? And then they say like, how much reward do you derive from this activity? So they also want you to get an idea of what does it do for you? And then it talks about your mood. Or you can say your sense of peace. Or you can say your sense of connection with Allah. And then it talks about cravings. So now what it does, this is important. It talks about look at your day. Now see the fluctuations between your activities, your mood, your cravings. So you might have certain periods of the day where your mood is high, your cravings are low and it's a meaningful activity. Great, don't touch that part of the day. Then you might have a part of the day that your mood is low, your cravings are high. That might be a part of the day that you need to focus on. And this is what we discussed. You don't have to, it's not about staying addiction free the whole day. It's about identifying those vulnerable points in your day. And it's usually the same time, the same place, the same pattern. And then you focus on that two hour place or that four hour time, maybe it's after work. For a lot of people, work is something that really structures them and it's something after work or some time. Then now you just have to focus on that two hour period of time. You can also think about it in a different way. Our addiction like through sheer motivation, 95% of the time we make good decisions. It's that 5% of the time that we make a bad decision that ruins it for the rest of the time. So you almost only have to break your goal once or engage in your addiction to have a once in order for many people to then go down a slippery slope of getting caught back up in that active addiction. All right, so that's activity monitoring. Now once you get an idea of how that at all works and you're aware of mood, what activities you're engaging in to get to that mood and that cravings, now you've hone in on those parts of the day that are sensitive areas and then you start to create a structure schedule of activities. So you look at all those activities that we talked about socializing, exercising, household responsibilities, hobbies, and you structure them in a way that is recovery oriented. And it goes into page 160. You wanna balance your should-dos with your want-to-dos. So it asks the question, are the things you are spending your time doing things that you are obligated to do or are they things that you find enjoyable? So doing things that you're just obligated to do constantly that you find no sense of fulfillment and can be difficult and early recovery. But then ideally those things just converge. And so it says in the last part of that paragraph, it talks about getting a balance of responsibility and rewarding activities. And it says on exercise 8.2 to create a list of things that you do to fulfill your responsibilities, your should-dos and the things that you do to sort of unwind and reward yourself and to create some sort of balance there. And then on exercise 8.3, it talks about pleasant activities. So it goes through a bunch of things. This is the page I told you with a bunch of lists, a list of several activities, like playing a sport, exercise, going to the zoo, cooking something new, reading something enjoyable, taking a class, going for a bike ride. So it has a bunch of things and the list goes on. And then it talks about an exercise 8.4 activity scheduling. Now here's an interesting part that I think is worth wrapping up with. And in fact, I debated if this is the thing I should talk about first today. So this was chapter 164, when things get in the way. Sometimes things just get in the way of our doing things for fun. It could be a practical problem, like figuring out who will watch the kids or how to free up your busy schedule. For this reason, scheduling activities in advance can be helpful because it will lead you to plan these kinds of obstacles. Look at the list of pleasant activities that you planned in the previous exercise. Take a few moments to think about potential barriers or things that might prevent you from doing one or more of them despite your best intentions. And then it goes through problem solving. So again, we talked about activity monitoring, activity scheduling, gradual goal setting, behavioral activation and picking activities, now problem solving through periods where you can't stick to the schedule. So it says, number one, brainstorm a list of all possible solutions that you can think of for each obstacle that gets in the way. Think about the pros and cons of each solution and narrow it down and try one of the best approaches. Okay, so this is the part that I wanted to get to on page 167. It says, negative moods can affect our expectations. This is the gem. Negative moods can affect our expectations about how much we can enjoy things. That is, if your mood isn't great, you probably don't expect that going out for dinner or being with other people is going to be enjoyable because you don't feel like it, but the reality can be quite different from what you expected because the activity itself can change your mood. So below are a few examples of thoughts that can get in the way of getting out and doing something fun. So here what it's saying is you've did the activity monitoring, you looked at your day, then you looked at scheduling an ideal day and you created real steps and goals to get there. Now, what do you do when you just don't feel like doing the activities? You know you're supposed to do them, but what do you do when you, you just kind of don't feel like it? You feel like blah, or you just don't feel like doing those activities. So what do you do? Actually, let me ask the question, what do you do? What would be some thoughts? Okay, let me go to, so it says, first it says, here are some thoughts that can get in the way. I don't feel like it, it won't be any fun. I'm just going to want to leave and go home if I go out to the must-get or if I go out to that circle of learning or if I go out and exercise, it'll be a waste of time. I'm going to ruin everyone else's fun with my bad mood. So it says, these are certain negative thoughts that are a big barrier for you to engage in those activities, which are then going to be activating and stimulating and improve your mood. So it's like the negative mood stays, gets in the way of the activities, which are the solution and the cure for that negative mood to get to the positive mood. So that gives us this solution. Here's the solution they give. It's called exercise 8.5 on page 168, pleasure predicting. So I'm going to read it. It says, as you're learning, our thoughts and feelings about activities can be very misleading at times. The idea behind pleasure predicting is that we act like scientists examining our negative thoughts and expectations about an activity. So that I know it's good for me, but I just don't feel like it. So examining these thoughts and gathering evidence to see whether or not they turn out to be accurate. So is it really going to be as bad as we think it's going to be? So according to this approach, just because you don't feel like doing something doesn't mean that it isn't worth doing. You can choose to do something and then decide whether it was enjoyable based on your observations about your thoughts and your mood during the activity. So here's how to do it. First, when you're planning to do an activity before you do it, write down how much you expect to enjoy it or you can just do it mentally. So you have an activity, let's say it's exercise or let's say it's visiting a friend. You say, write down how much you expect to enjoy it and use a percentage from zero to 100. So you say something like, you know, I'm just not feeling it. I know this is something I'm supposed to do for my overall, for the big picture and my overall health and my recovery plan, but I feel like 50%. I feel like this is going to be 50% that I will enjoy it. And then what it says is pay attention to any thoughts that you have about the activity and write them down. Like the thoughts like, you know, I know this is good for me, but I just feel like it's not going to do what I need it to do. Okay, so the second point is then do the activity. Even if you rated it as a zero or a five, just do it. Because without this stuff, you can't do pleasure predicting. This whole thing don't work. The whole experiment won't work. Then during the activity, pay attention to any thoughts you are having about it and jot them down or just make a mental note of it. After you finish the activity, rate how much you actually enjoyed it. So you had the 50% that you thought you were going to enjoy it, but then once you do the activity, rate how much you actually enjoyed it from zero to 100. And then compare the enjoyment rating when you predicted it to the actual enjoyment. And the idea is to be an objective observer of your experience and begin to identify patterns. And they even have a exercise 8.6 pleasure predicting form. Where it says, look at the pleasant activity, then write the prediction before, then the pleasure rating afterwards, then the thoughts before and during the activity. And so this is a really great exercise and process to see the discrepancy before hand and after hand. So now what you can do is say, look, objectively, I feel 50% is going to be good. I mean, subjectively, I feel like 50% is going to be good. But you know what? Last time I said the same thing, 50%. And it turned out to be 100%. So now you can say, I know 100%, this is going to be something that's worth it for me, or 85% or whatever percentage you did. And that exercise now allows you to do more to overcome that next time. And then exercise 8.7 is reward yourself for scheduling and following through. So attaching, doing the good things that you feel like you need to do for your recovery, reward yourself for doing those things. So that could be something like, if I exercise three times a week, I will do, I'll go to a restaurant or something like that, or whatever is rewarding for you. And then we wrap up on page 171. And the next two sections are the last two sections, chapter nine and chapter 10. So we've made it far through the book. Chapter nine goes over one more time emotions in recovery. So now we've created a lifestyle in chapter eight. Chapter nine goes through emotions and like anger, stress, how do we manage that when that happens? And then chapter 10 goes into your personalized recovery plan. So taking all of this and then now putting pen to paper and figuring out, all right, out of all of this, what can I start doing now? Let's start taking it out of theory. If we haven't started implementing this stuff now, let's start taking it out of theory and start doing it. Because sometimes when reading this book, the feeling is like, okay, I can't do this. Maybe the next chapter is gonna be something that I think I can do. It's gonna be that magic pill. And then we're like, no, okay, now we're at the end of it. We've gone through what the literature, the science experience shows works. Now out of that piece of information, that's a lot of what I do. A lot of what I do is just letting people know, listen, there's this sphere of things that have been shown to work and that work for people, within that list. Now, instead of going on this search for the holy grail of the magic pill that's gonna make life better, life getting better is not gonna happen by chance. It's gonna happen by taking calculated risks and making good decisions. And that's how life is gonna change. So we go to the sphere of things that have been shown to work to take calculated risks. So we wanna take risks that have some probability of working and then it's making decisions, making commitments. I'm gonna do this, this, this and this. Those are things I can do. That's a low hanging fruit. And then maybe this is something that I can incorporate into the future and I'll start working on and practicing on. So it gets to a point where now chapter 10, we start talking about a practical, personalized recovery plan and then just making it happen and going from there. So with that, I'll wrap up. I know we went long, but I wanted to finish this session. We covered a lot of material and inshallah, probably within another few sessions, we can finish the rest of the chapters.